Professor Michael Altman obtained his BA degree with Honors (1982) from the University of Pennsylvania and his ScM (1984) and PhD (1988) degrees from Brown University in the United States. He was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship (1988-1990) to pursue post-doctoral research at the Technische Universitaet Clausthal in Germany. He joined the Physics Department of HKUST in 1991, and served as Department Head from 2010 to 2018. In recognition of his teaching excellence, Professor Altman was honored with the HKUST School of Science Teaching Award in 1997.

Professor Altman’s experimental research program is aimed at understanding fundamental structural, electronic, magnetic and dynamical properties of surfaces, interfaces, thin films and surface-supported nanostructures. Several topics that he focuses on are related to the bottom-up fabrication and morphological control of thin films and nanostructures. These topics include, for example, collective surface diffusion and growth, step motion kinetics and step morphology, and quantum size effects. Professor Altman’s research on surface alloy formation and stability is driven by his interest in the potential functionality of surface alloys as novel substrates. Professor Altman also pursues interests in magnetism in reduced dimensions by studying the magnetic properties of macroscopic ultrathin films and a running parallel program on spin polarized field emission and spectroscopy of nanoscopic magnetic tips.

Professor Altman utilizes a variety of cathode lens electron microscopies - conventional and spin polarized low energy electron microscopy (LEEM and SPLEEM), spectroscopic and x-ray circular magnetic dichroism photoemission electron microscopy (SPELEEM and XMCD-PEEM) - combined with conventional low energy electron diffraction techniques and micro-low energy electron diffraction from very small selected areas. Prof Altman has contributed to the development of these experimental techniques as co-inventor of SPLEEM and through his development of image formation theory and explanations of phase contrast mechanisms.